Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 62

Advantage Goliath

<><>Tesco maintains that it will buy local produce "wherever possible". But when its representatives were challenged on this point, they said that local suppliers would have to sell their produce to the company as a whole. It would be trucked to the nearest distribution centre – now 120 miles away in Avonmouth – and then trucked back across Wales to Machynlleth. Incredibly, Tesco proposes that its new store will reduce traffic on our congested roads. It appears to be relying on a radical misinterpre</></>

robogod

I vividly remember playing in Mayflower Park, the windswept public space that divides the city's dead and 'alive' docks, on my birthday. I was, being a child of the 80s, fairly obsessed with robots, specifically Transformers. My parents, were they contributors to my comments box, would tell you, unprompted, the story about me coming home from nursery school claiming we'd been told about 'this robot called God' (well how else to explain it?).

Owen Hatherley (in a longer piece on the architecture o

fourth seeks three

I may have to retract my dismissal of bridge as a game with relevance to the world of finance. Warren Buffett apparently thinks otherwise.

<>On one occasion [Buffett:] is reported to have said: "I wouldn't mind going to jail if I had three cellmates who played bridge".

[know the feeling - thought it would depend how well they played bridge:]

<>Buffett himself says about bridge: "It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes…In the stock m</></>

less unprintable than previously supposed

Languagehat has buried a terrific offer in the Comments section.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the US publishers of Uglier than a Monkey's Armpit did manage to include the names of both authors of on the cover of a book with two authors (a feat we might once, in our innocence, have taken for granted), but absentmindedly forgot to include the introduction by Steve "Languagehat" Dodson - a feature unique to the US edition, which for fans of LH's indispensable blog must be one of the chief att

life, the universe and everything

A friend of mine once put it succinctly: "Physics is all about findingout which variables you know and which variable you want, and then searching through your formula sheet for an equation that has all of those letters in it."

GravityandLevity.

Explaining that, for those who immediately liked physics in high school, this was what they liked about it.

When G&L went to college he began to find that what interested him was the picture that began to emerge of how the universe worked. Hence this terrif

babies

Infinite Thought is off-message. Here, here.

<>Do I need to have a kid to understand Antichrist properly? I'm not sure. But I don't think procreation is a topic that should be solely restricted to those who happen to have done it. I may not understand the desire to have my own kid, but I do understand the human need to look after someone, believe it or not. If I move somewhere bigger than a shared one-bed flat (soon), I hope in a while (if I pass the tests) to be in a position to foster whoever co</>

how to build a better blog

Maira Kalman at the NYT on Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Uncle Cobbley and all, why is here no match for there? anyway, over there.

ineffable words

About a year ago Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit, a book on untranslatable insults, put-downs and curses from around the world, was published in the UK. Author, according to the cover, Robert Vanderplank.

Nothing odd about that, except that the book had two authors, one of whom was Steve Dodson of Language Hat fame. (Note that it seems not to have occurred to OUP* that mentioning LH might actually bring hordes of readers clamouring for the book. Some believe in God without knowing whether one ex